Merchant Archive
Thread: Merchant Item Limits Focus Thread: Please try to be constructive and rational (Pt 2)
Jas-Won
Mon Aug 16, 2004 5:01 am
#287
IMO, Merchant, as a stand alone career, is a waste of skill points (Hence why no one keeps it), crafters often have it bad enough not being able to invest in elite combat skills, but forcing them to take on a more or less trivial career, thus giving them no freedom to hold combat careers, is going to ruin the game.
It removes personal freedom, while offering no alternative or benifit.
Unless theres some major revamp that will have every man and his dog wanting to be a Merchant, my best suggestion is simply do away with Merchant altogether, and intergrate the whole vendors thing into other crafting professions, artisan would have the basic starting package I guess (Although it seems a bit unfair, Artisan is nowadays a full crafting profession in it's own right), then as you move onto elite crafting careers you get more options moving up in the Mercaht career would grant.
And so what if people have more then one elite crafting profession and get more vendors?, they've got more stuff to sell.
The item cap though?, I somehow feel that will kill the career on it's own (As is alreadybeing shown by the incredible amount of downsizement/closing down sales...), people are just simply going to stop using vendors, and if for some reason they don't completely throw away there business, find alternatives.
BatAvner
Mon Aug 16, 2004 5:09 am
#288
I understand, Enginear...
There are 5 members of my family playing SWG and we have 10 accounts between us...we just changed all 10 to 30-day accounts.
Will_Scarlet
Mon Aug 16, 2004 5:14 am
#289
I think the DBA's would be better suited to dropping people whose characters have been gone for months. Heck I have been maintaining a departed friends four houses since last September. Cleaning that and abandoned merchants would improve your database IMO. But the nerf of merchant is a bit perplexing. Ok maybe you dont want one merchant having 6k items per vendor but the numbers I have heard really stink. I realized 6 months into this game I needed to generate some revenue in order to play/combat throughout the galaxies. So enter the alt, who became Master Arch/ Merchant/ Artisan after 4 months. Now with alot of skill points in and 6 vendors to sell my wares as well as loot and whatever the prime character had made, I am going to either run extremely low inventories (i.e. 110 houses on one vendor, 110 couches on another and so forth and so on). Meanwhile to avoid GRINDING, which all you "developers" loudly and boldly cried out against at Fan Fest, I will now have to grind hand to mouth now in order to maintain some stock for sales. Do to the restriction on storage, I will likely never have more than 2-3 days worth of restocks, unless I scrap part of my 15 available harvesters.
Of course this will put me in the ideal position to compete with those people who have made tons of cross server trades and now have 200 plus static harvesters. In essence you will put me hands down out of business with these people. I had the SAME discussion with Green Marine at Fan Fest yet your view of economics does not seem to match the game play here. YOU set the sinks, YOU set the rules, then when people begin to prosper at them, you change them? Please, remove your eyes from the code and realize, one thing that helps make this game run is the "player run economy" which you widely touted through all the publications. Even if the Merchant ISN"T the loudest profession it certainly needs more power than the Jedi, who have gotten every damn bit of attention since the whiners flooded the boards.
Sgian_Dubh
Mon Aug 16, 2004 5:36 am
#290
Creadux Wrote :
The solution is simple really .. sell your goods to a REAL merchant for resale.
Dude this simply introduces inflation into the economy. I make and sell 80% kinetic composite armor and sell for just 200K when I could easily sell for 400K or more. I sell so low because it took me 6 months to afford my first set and it changed my game and I enjoyed it a lot more. I want other players to share in that. Reselling to Merchants will simply drive prices higher excluding players from enjoying their gaming experience more.
The solution is simple really .. sell your goods to a REAL merchant for resale.
Dude this simply introduces inflation into the economy. I make and sell 80% kinetic composite armor and sell for just 200K when I could easily sell for 400K or more. I sell so low because it took me 6 months to afford my first set and it changed my game and I enjoyed it a lot more. I want other players to share in that. Reselling to Merchants will simply drive prices higher excluding players from enjoying their gaming experience more.
rygell
Mon Aug 16, 2004 5:48 am
#291
How is this for a proposal, leave the vendor limits at 150 itemslike you have proposed and remove the vendors that are empty. but allow the stock room to be an actual stockroom. that way a tailor can fill up their vendor and pull items from their stockroom and place them for sale. so the stockroom will essentially be an unlimited storage space without the risk of losing whats in the stockroom after seven days.
Thanks for listening
Dart'
Epzil0n
Mon Aug 16, 2004 6:21 am
#292
I'm sad to say that when this goes live, I'll quit playing.
Kinda sucks really... Part of me hopes that SOE will come to their senses but I cant afford waiting around, hoping they will. So the day it goes live I have no choice but to give up my profession, distribute my resources and quit 
See you all in another MMO game...
IGN Zadrak
Master Doctor
Branes
Mon Aug 16, 2004 6:42 am
#293
I just bought City of Heroes in anticipation of leaving SWG if the merchant nerf goes throught. It's a shame because this gamehas the potential tobe the greatest MMORPG of all. I haven't played them all, only EQ, DAoC and SWG, and now a little CoH, but so far, it's the only game that actually allows you to be whatever or whoever you want at any time and not be locked into any one class or profession. Game design issues aside, it seems to me that there is an over-concentration on gameplay issues with the developers and and almost complete lack of concern for the actual technical problems in the game. Every profession has bugs that weaken it. For example: I'm a Master Droid Engineer, but do to a bug, I can't put a storage unit in a Surgical Droid, effectively making them useless since every Doctor I've sold to requires storage with their med units. This isn't a design issue, it's a coding bug and should have been fixed as soon as it was reported. But the devs decided to work on Jedi issues, racetracks, and God knows what else instead of fixing what was broken. Now they want to cripple the crafting professions!!??? Don't crafters have enough of a disadvantage having to waste valuable skill points just for the right to sell what we make? Now you want to limit how much we can have on vendors? Just what IS wrong with using vendors as additional storage anyway? Limiting a crafter to 250 items in a house taking up 6 lots is ludicrous!! And I'm supposed to be able to have factories, harvesters and vendors with the other 4. In order to be able to actually BE a successful crafter and merchant, I essnetially MUST have anadditional account just for the lots, meaning the game is costing me twice as much monthly as the average combat player. I have over 100 different resources as a Master Artisan/Master MDE, not to mention the hundreds of crates of droid components I need to keep around to fill orders with quickly. It's been said many times, if you want to fix merchant, get rid of the vendors that have been empty for months, end vendor poaching so that those of us who actually have the merchant points are the only ones who get benefits by them. But for God's sake, leave the rest of us alone!!!!
Jolieann
Mon Aug 16, 2004 7:08 am
#294
got a few more ideas to shoot your way ladies and gentleman.
(the "*" is just a base idea to explain the design of the argument) WHY VENDORS SHOULD STAY
A) you canarm any weapons even though you dont have the skills to. you just wont do much if any damage.
REBUTTAL: -max things vendors can hold and place more in merchant tree. (*10 items base)
-start cost of vendors high (*10k$/week + 20% of item being sold)
B) As you go up the skill. The costs comes down to say *500/week for masters. items being sold would max at
*100and items in the stockroom you would have a*100 item graceand anything more then that would cost
you *100 creditsa week per item. You would get an automated mail stating all of this. Same as structures
that are going to blow.
C) Same principal w/ the banks. get your 100 item grace and anything more would be *100 credits billed w/ an
automail sent to you.It wouldincourage crafters to live in player cities. Banks in cities would be a new focal
point surrounded by housing. because we all use our factories to hold 100 items.
D) Selling items in packs would be a skill acquired in merchant. Which can be played arround w/. Starting w/
say*5 packs that can be sold at a time per vendor, w/ a max of itemsbeing held in them of :*5. Which in
turn both can go up in number as the skill grows.
CONCLUSION
-For those of us who've played for years, we allknow that selling our wears gets our names out. NOW i know
ive met people that bought something frommyvendors. Whobecame friends, allies and enemies,which in
turn,veered my experience of the game, in a myriad of directions. 
-That's whyi think it needs to stay in some form. causeitsthe best way to meetgood people. 'cause we all
know250 points to play w/ is not enough, soto share this load,you need tofind good people andwhat better
wayofdoing so. Becausewe have douzens if not 100s ofpeopleseeing our name every week and spreding
the word.
NOW you want to scale this down to 10 or 20% of the population?
-I personally made alot of good friends this way and to short change new players of this experience would be
asacrilege to the game itself. Think pass the money... 
ASK yourself this QUESTION?
"How many people did i meet, crafters and soldiers. Through there vendors and your own. that are now an
integral part of your day to day game play..."
That's what i think and THANK YOU for listening
MrHavecam
Mon Aug 16, 2004 8:05 am
#295
UBAL wrote:
Ok, I´m not all into this merchant thing..
But I understood something about SOE wanting to make you have to have a certain lvl to have any amount of items on vendor..
I have 2 "fighter" chars more or less, I don´t like destroying stuff, and I have taken AND KEPT0040 artisan to have my 1 vendor which I don´t sell from, but I only use for storage since it would take more than 10 houses to store all the items I like to collect...
So I just need to know, the 1000+ items I have.... When do I have to setup so many houses to store all my items in it.... because the only thing SOE will really gain from this in my experience is people leaving for being beeped over, and the planets being spammed with either people crafting and selling at starports making merchant an even more useless profession than it already is, or so many houses for storage that you cant go anywhere without FPS at 1 all the time from all the houses that are suddenly being built for storage, simply because the houses have no storage capacity... and it certainly wont help if the vendors dont get any storage capacity anymore..
as I said, I have KEPT my artisan 0040 so I could avoid having to do all of this, with my vendor, and now I hear that they found a way to screw me over after spending all this time using those skillpoints on having my vendor, and not just thrown away the skills, like I understand is what they are trying to combat here.
But as this is a constructive criticisms thread then here is my proposal :
Make vendors have an admin console, where there is a timer for your items, just like on bazaar, the owner of the vendor can put a friend (or unknown if it should come to that) on his vendor admin list, BUT only the person placing the item on the vendor can take it out, and the vendor cannot just be deleted without all items having been removed.
The owner of the vendor will then whenever doing something that will affect the other peoples items make the vendor send out a message to the others.
For instance, if the owner wishes to delete the vendor, the other people stocking items on the vendor will then have 7 days to move all their items from the vendor and to an alternative location, if not, then the items will disappear with the vendor after the time of 7 weeks.
Another alternative would be to just leave it the way it is, and have it work that : those without merchant skills (merchant skills being the entire merchant tree including artisan 0030 and 0040) will instantly on patch lose their vendor and everything on it, and will be unable to place a new one without having and keeping the skills.
And if they are so fond of their limited item vendors, then atleast make it a decent lvl... 100 items on a vendor is a total screwover... 100 items for each lvl through : artisan 0010 = 100 items, artisan 0020 = 200 items, artisan 0030 = 300 items, artisan 0040 = 400 items, novice merchant = 500 items, management 1 = 600 items, management 2 = 700 items, management 3 = 800 items, management 4 = 900 items, and in the end master merchant = 1000 items ( or 1500 to make it more attractive to take all those other skills).
UBAL, you are the problem. Vendors are for selling items, not for storage. Factories are for creating items, not for storage. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to have 1000+ items sitting around just because they "don't like destroying stuff." If you do insist upon keeping this many items, then you should have to use all of your lots to do so. 5 small houses X 150 items + bank + what you can hold on your person is 959 items per account. That is more than generous. It might be time to cut some of those broken datapads loose...
They didn't find a way to screw you over. You have been screwing them over by exploiting the system. Because so many people choose to "work the system", the devs are having to spend coding timeclosing loopholes.
Now for my suggestions:
300 items per vendor. Number of vendors remains the same as it is now. Maintenance cost is based on the total value of the items on your vendor(s). Ability to add administrators to a vendor to add and remove items. Similar to stuctures, though, only the vendor's owner can remove the vendor. I would really like to be able to update the name of the vendor. I also like the aforementioned idea that empty vendors automatically disappear from the global listings.
captenjonny
Mon Aug 16, 2004 8:51 am
#296
QuadShot wrote:
Ok, maybe I'm a rock and just missed it.... I have some vendors, but I'm not a merchant anymore, what's going to happen to my vendors now!? If I loose them, I guess I'll have to stand at the star port and spam my goods or I'll just drop the game all together since it will no longer be "conducive to the MMORPG genre".
Good! Drop the game. YOU AND YOUR KIND, who own vendors WITHOUT the investment of skill points, are one of the big reasons LEGITIMATE Merchants are getting NERFED!!!
As to he point of the thread, Just make the limits aggregate and reasonable (1K - 2K range)
Kilarny
Mon Aug 16, 2004 8:59 am
#297
Thunderheart wrote:
Just a quick update folks. I have a meeting to go over the limits and changes tomorrow afternoon. I've been going over the proposed changes put forth by you, through DocSavag and they will be addressed. I'll have an answer for you either Monday and Tuesday.
About time we got a comment, harrrrr......Avast! Hold off on the keelhaulin'
Please attempt to transmit our annoyance.
0smspiff0
Mon Aug 16, 2004 9:05 am
#298
"Just my quick input, but as a master armorsmith, if you have such a low limit, customers won't be able to have nearly the selection that they expect because of the numerous types of armor. And with nine sets per piece for some types or armor, you won't be able to put much at all for sale unless you have multiple accounts. I think the limits should be raised significantly so that with master merchant one would be able to hold maybe 2,000 items."
Perhaps that is their intent... they want crafters to specialize. That is good in that it may make a market for entry level crafters, reduces the chance of monopolies (remeber that the schematic limit was not supposed to be 1000 to begin with so this will, in a way, help correct that mistake), and force crafters to pick and choose what items they will make (which is how you get the other two changes).
On the bad side it will be harder for customers to find what they are after and will require more frequent adding of items to vendors by merchants.
snuff0r
Mon Aug 16, 2004 9:05 am
#299
the devs deleted it, it caused seriousdatabase problems...
ok for real now:
i admit you guys might have a real database problem...
i dont know how things are working in this game, but it seems pretty much everybody is pissed cause you are going to introduce a limit BEFORE you are cleaning up your databases, deleting old characters and stuff.
dont you think this should be done in some kind of stages?
like first clear out deleted characters, second remove all vendors of players that dont have the skill for it, and finally revamp merchant a little to make master merchant real powerful.
it definetly needs to be revamped to make it a real profession, not a skill you must have to sell your stuff